Saturday, 24 January 2015

Mohammed — in pictures

The Spectator
The Koran has no injunction against depicting Mohammed. In fact, within Islam, there’s a rich tradition of painting the Prophet "

Whatever the heritage of their medieval past, Sunni Islam — in the
Arab-speaking Middle East — had decisively turned its back on depictions
of the Prophet well before the 18th-century emergence of Wahhabism.
Once again there are no definite answers. It may have been a gut
reaction to the magnificent art produced by their Iranian Shiite rivals
but it also reflects a very real fear that Mohammed was slowly being
turned into a demi-god and that in the process his actual prophetic
message would be ignored. This was especially true in the far eastern
frontiers of Islam, such as India and Indonesia (numerically the two
largest Muslim nations in the world) with their ancient syncretic
traditions. So the attack on imagery can also be seen to have a
constructive element embedded within it, concentrating all attention on
the text of the Koran and reinforcing the Arab nature of that
revelation. "